There is important political news in West Virginia where the entire public school system has been shut down for over a week by a statewide teacher’s strike protesting poor pay, soaring health insurance costs, plus poor working conditions. But the media has been paying scant attention to this major story. While part of the blame can be placed on the White House soap opera/circus that has soaked up much of the attention, that is not the only reason. The major media in the US are corporate capitalist enterprises and thus instinctively anti-union. They thus do not want to give oxygen to the trade union movement by highlighting that kind of collective action. If the strike receives major favorable coverage, then that might pressure the state legislators into doing something and the strikers might win their demands. The newspapers and their corporate allies fear strengthening the union movement.
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Liliana Segura writes about the botched attempt last week by the state of Alabama at executing Doyle Lee Hamm, who had been on death row since 1987. What resulted was nothing less than torture as the state rushed to execute him before the midnight deadline for the execution warrant expired, all the while trying to hide what happened from his lawyer, his brother, and an outside anesthetist.
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British imperialism is usually portrayed in the English media by English-speakers who are broadly sympathetic to Britain and thus see its colonial practices through rose-tinted glasses. It is portrayed as a somewhat benevolent empire, at least when compared to how the Belgians treated their colonies. The British built roads, railways, schools, and created administrative structures. All these were to enable more efficient looting of the colonies’ resources but they did constitute a legacy of sorts that they left behind. While they did commit acts of brutality, these tend to be downplayed.
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Perhaps the easiest step we can take to encourage more humane agricultural practices is to buy eggs that are produced by farms where the hens are ‘free-range’, i.e., not confined to tiny spaces but free to roam on pastures. And indeed more and more people seem to be buying such eggs. In my local supermarket, the brands that sold them used to have a small space in the egg section but now it has expanded considerably as people become more aware of what exactly goes on in egg farms.
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